Song of the Distant Root

Salustio initiates a journey with his family to a place he imagines will be a utopia, if he can find where it is. Driven to search for such a home, called Tapihue, by his dreams, Salustio envisions it as a place where a sense of community and solidarity can be fully realized. The journey toward an end of ambiguous reality becomes the heart of the novel, and

Overview

Salustio initiates a journey with his family to a place he imagines will be a utopia, if he can find where it is. Driven to search for such a home, called Tapihue, by his dreams, Salustio envisions it as a place where a sense of community and solidarity can be fully realized. The journey toward an end of ambiguous reality becomes the heart of the novel, and Salustio begins to discover the meaning of existence itself.

In this oppressively magical-realist novella, Salustio, a self-styled Utopian visionary,"dreams" a village where freedom and equality flourish, andrather like St.-Exupéry's Little Princegoes in search of it, meeting en route many self-consciously symbolic figures (including, wouldn't you know it, a priest who converses with birds). The only rational voice to be heard amid this whimsy is the earthy, sardonic one of Salustio's clear-eyed wife Clarisa. One finds oneself wishing, metafictionally, that sherather than the earnest Elizabeth Subercaseauxhad written this book.